How to best use Pair Up?

So a lot of what I've read suggest that Hard mode is going to start kicking my butt if I don't use Pair Up. The problem is the few times I have used it, I haven't really seem much benefit. Yeah, it makes my units a bit stronger, but at the cost of cutting my mobile units down by one, poor experience gains for the paired unit, and an inability to do anything with both characters if they split.

I mean, I know the idea of sticking together things like a knight and a mage, or pegasus and knight, but I only get to use the utility of one of the pair. Like in pegasus/knight, I either get the good move from the pegasus, or the good defense of the knight. If I pair a character up with a cleric, I have to swap them before I can heal, and now the character the cleric is paired with can't do jack until the next turn, including acting as part of the wall to protect the squishy units. I dunno, I just feel like I lose a lot of versatility for a little combined utility and some stats.---"Now when I tell you to ascend to a higher plane of consciousness, you say HOW HIGH SIR?" --Bucky Katt

IMO, you shouldn't really be pairing knights and mages together. If anything, you want Mage + Cleric/Mage/Troubadour/Whatever Increases Mag or Speed for more killing potential.

Knight + Pegasus, the Knight can still utilize the Pegasus's movement. Make the Knight be the Pegasus's support, move Pegasus, switch over to Knight.

Losing versatility for stats + possibility of negating damage + possibility of doing massive damage to one unit is a fair tradeoff for me.

Also I don't know about you, but +5 to speed, strength, mag, and whatnot is a pretty massive increase to me.

You also should be making somewhat overpowered/overlevelled units pair up with weaker units who can't do much. An amazing example of this is the Donnel chapter. Getting Donnel to kill anything solely by himself in a reasonable amount of time isn't possible. Pair him up with Vaike or Frederick? He's suddenly capable of doing 50% of an enemy's HP.

In the early game you wanna(you'll have to) stick Fred and Kellam on your main units for that tasty +4 def boost. After that it's pretty much just working out good combinations. I pair physically tough infantry units with Peg knights and magic tough infantry with wyverns to cover weak points and have massive movement. True, one of the units typically ends up higher level than the other, but smart use of switching can even it out a fair amount.

I think the problem is I feel like taking the time to pair up slows down my momentum, and in a game where enemies are going to all head towards me, any enemy I'm not taking the time to kill is another enemy that's going to hit me later. And with fewer targets for the enemies to hit, the more hits each pair is going to take.

I probably play with a pretty bad mentality, but my general take on most FE maps is to build killing momentum; never stop moving forward and killing, even it's only a few spaces at a time. With Pair Up, I feel like I can't build any momentum, and if I try to pair up in the middle of a map, it slows me down a lot.

I probably just need to take the time to get used to the mechanic, and it probably just doesn't fit with my playstyle, at least not yet.---"Now when I tell you to ascend to a higher plane of consciousness, you say HOW HIGH SIR?" --Bucky Katt

You really should be using Pair-Up, especially if you are playing Hard or Lunatic. But you need to raise your pair's support ranking before you'll see all the benefits.

Due to the stat increases, two characters paired will do much more damage (and can take more hits) then two characters separate. Speed and STR bonuses and Dual-Strike means paired units can often do 4 times the damage as an individual unit.

And I'd argue that magic users and knights make for a good pair, since the mage gives the knight magic resistance, and the knight gives the mage the extra defense mages so desperately need.

It only gives experience to those who deal damage. If both paired units are able to attack/counter, and they both get a hit in, then they both get experience.---"Do you remember the episode where Ash caught a Pumbloom?""Dude!--" "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Also, if the enemy is killed and the paired unit attacks, they both seem to get a similar amount. The paired unit just gets very little/nothing if they don't attack, or attack and the enemy still survives.---PSN: Ranylyn. Playing Mass Effect 3Main class: Vanguard. Secondary Class: Engineer.